Not every analytic professional has the same definition of ‘Team’
I learned this the hard way, after working with analysts and developers spread across six continents.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- During a team meeting, you’re thinking how your colleague’s technique is wrong or their coding is sloppy. Do you say this in the meeting?
- Your new colleagues invite you to a social event but you have a lot of work to do. What should you tell them?
- Your team has just delivered some great results. Do you praise the team as a whole, or do you draw attention to the accomplishments of specific individuals?
There is no right answer to these questions. What’s worse, your colleagues may be convinced that opposite answers are ‘obviously right ’!
For each of these questions, the ‘obviously right answer’ depends on your cultural background. The challenge for data scientists, analysts and software developers is that we often work with colleagues and stakeholders from diverse cultures. This makes it easy to ‘get it wrong’ if we assume everyone thinks like we do.
Your answers to the above depend largely on whether you come from an ‘collective culture’ or an ‘individualistic culture’ (as defined in research by Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede).
Collective cultures naturally form cohesive groups that provide protection to their members in exchange for loyalty. This sense of belonging is very important, so there’s a natural formation of “in” and “out” groups. Relationships are more important than tasks or even moral norms, and members avoid criticizing other group members. Thus, emotions are generally suppressed in the interest of harmony.
Individualistic cultures, on the other hand, expect people to care for themselves and to have the right to privacy and time alone. Individual opinion is valued, and speaking one’s mind is considered a good thing. Tasks prevail over relationships.
Do you start to see how this can be a land mine in your team?
Here’s an example from my days as the Head of Global Business Analytics at eBay Classifieds Group.
For several years, I managed a team of Chinese developers based in Shanghai, while I myself was working in Amsterdam. I was amazed at the cohesion within the Shanghai team. Not only would they spend long days working together, they would often spend large portions of the weekend hanging out, sometimes singing karaoke until early hours of Saturday morning (It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when two team members eventually married)
At the same time, I noticed a subtle difference in how the Chinese communicated about their colleagues. Part of my standard interview questionnaire was to ask applicants to describe a person from their past whom they had enjoyed working with and another person whom they had not enjoyed working with.
I noticed that few if any of the Chinese applicants were willing to describe a former colleague in negative terms. I soon dropped this question for Chinese applicants.
To give you an idea of how various cultures differ, here some of the highest and lowest scores for individualism (using Hofstede’s scale)
Returning to the two questions at the beginning of this section, if you are in a collective culture, you should be extra careful not to say something that would make a colleague look bad in a group setting. You will want to participate in group social events, such as joining your team for lunch, whenever possible. Both of these are less critical (albeit still valued) practices within individualistic cultures.
Tips for working with differing levels of Individualism
This topic is quite nuanced, but here are a few tips
When working with individualistic colleagues:
- Acknowledge their individual accomplishments. They generally will appreciate feeling that they’re exceptional in some way.
- Realize that they may choose not to mix work and social life. They may be friendly and even talk about their personal lives while at work, but don’t be offended if they don’t join you for drinks or dinner afterward.
- Encourage debate and expression of individual ideas. They’ll grow frustrated if they feel they’re not allowed to express their opinions.
When working with collectivist colleagues:
- Try to spend time together while you’re not working, such as during meals or social events. You may find they even appreciate being asked to do things together on weekends.
- Avoid expressing negative feelings or expressing negativity toward the ideas of others, particularly in public. These cultures use other channels for feedback — channels that are acceptable in their respective cultures but that may seem unusual to you. Find out what those channels are for the cultures you interact with.
- Highlight group, rather than individual, accomplishments. Celebrating team accomplishments with team social events works well, as these cultures are more open to having such events outside of working hours.
Since a sense of affiliation is such a core human need, we can see how cultural misunderstandings in this dimension can cause deep emotional turmoil and potentially lead to serious conflict. If not handled wisely, cultural misunderstandings in this area can easily short-circuit your projects.
How about you? Have there been examples from your work where misunderstandings arose because people within your team had different ideas of what ‘team’ should mean?
This post is an excerpt from my recent book Business Skills for Data Scientists: Practical Guidance in Six Key Topics, a book which is itself based on trainings which I have developed for companies and university programs. Follow me on Linkedin.
